Talk:putz

Pinging Yiddish-knowledgeable editors @Metaknowledge, Wikitiki89: can you take a look at this edit and see if it is good or not? - -sche (discuss) 04:07, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

The only thing right about it is that I'm pretty sure the Yiddish word is spelled פּאָץ (pots), even though we have an entry for it at פּוץ (puts). I will investogate further. --WikiTiki89 12:18, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

I confirmed that פּאָץ (pots) is the Yiddish spelling (Beinfeld/Bochner). --WikiTiki89 14:56, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into it. - -sche (discuss) 22:50, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

RFV discussion: November 2017–January 2018

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putz

Rfv-sense Tagged but not listed. Kiwima (talk) 21:43, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

Putzen is still very much in use in German (meaning to clean or polish), I'm unsure as to why it's listed as "archaic German". I can't speak toward the Pennsylvania-German cite, but its regular use in Germany potentiates it as a colloquialism in English to a degree, although not quite enough to merit its listing I would imagine. Ozelot911 (talk) 23:48, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

I managed to find two quotes - one for making decorations and the other for cleaning. Kiwima (talk) 01:37, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

I have removed the claim about it’s archaicness. This is an impression that can appear when thinking about certain applications of this word, as Kopfputz, i. e. the stuff women do with their conks, but the disuse is rather because of changing fashion, i. e. the disuse of the underlying concept, and there are crucial appliances of the word that it won’t be archaic in this century, like referring to render on walls or various artistic concepts. That’s what you can know about German Putz. Palaestrator verborum (loquier) 02:05, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

RFV-failed Kiwima (talk) 23:17, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

Pronunciation audio file

I have recorded an audio file for putz:

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

I am not sure which etymology (if any) this file belongs to. --Commander Keane (talk) 02:51, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Verb

Shouldn't the verb be listed under putz around, given that it can't appear by itself? -- Mocha2007 (talk) 02:33, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

I've heard it used by itself. "I'm just putzin'", etc. And I think there was a store called The Putz or The Putzer in the 1990s and that it was aimed at men and was not related to the other meanings of the word we list. But I'll probably never turn it up now. —Soap— 15:22, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

euphemism for fart

This was my parents' word for fart because they brought me up in a world without obscenities and even words like fart were off the table for me. I did once hear another person using the word in the sense of fart, so I know that my parents didnt just make it up, and that since it isnt a subject my friend group would often talk about, hearing it just once in all those years doesnt surprise me. This rare sense of the word could connect the expression putz around to the essentially synonymous fart around. And then putter around, used in Calvin & Hobbes, might be a euphemism. It might have something to do with the German word Pfurz, or it might just be sound symbolism. However this is all speculation, and I might be wrong about everything except that the word putz can occasionally mean fart. But it seems to be pretty rare, so it might be both a regionalism and an archaic one, dying out among the few people who grew up using it. —Soap— 15:29, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Ah I didnt think to click futz until now. That probably explains it all ... it really does come from the German word for fart, and German also has its equivalent of "fart around", so we translated the expression but also kept an incompletely translated version perhaps since it seemed gentler to delicate ears. The change of f- to p- might be an attempt to further diverge from the more familiar word fart, or perhaps since German itself has a variant form Pfurz we had it alongside the f- form from the beginning. Or, assuming putter around is not a euphemism for the euphemism, the change of f- to p- might have come from merging the two expressions into one. —Soap— 15:44, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

this entry might have more information, or it might not ... I certainly wont be paying, but if someone is bored and has a subscription (or more likely, is in a library that does), this site might know something we can't easily find anywhere else. —Soap— 11:18, 8 March 2023 (UTC)